What is SEO and how can it help my business?

SEO is one of the areas of digital marketing that everyone talks about, but few really know it in depth. Want to understand more about the possibilities of content optimization strategies? Follow our latest post on the topic.

It's not today that people talk about the importance of creating qualified content for websites and blogs. To properly understand SEO, which is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization – that is, Search Engine Optimization – we need to understand the following topics:

• What are search engines?
• What is Content Indexing?
• What are the differences between organic search and paid search?
• How can SEO benefit my business?

Search engines or search engines

Basically, they are online services that allow the user to find results on the web based on specific terms. As much as Google is the main search engine when we think about engines and search engines, there are several other services, such as Bing, MSN Seacrh, Ask, Yahoo, among others.

Remembering that we are talking about searching the general internet directory, that is, searching the various existing and indexed sites on the computer network. It turns out that certain services have a high volume of searches within their own content, such as YouTube, TikTok, among others.

Therefore, search engines are understood to be online services that, by means of terms required by the user, display results according to certain factors. The main and mandatory factor for a website to be displayed in a search engine is that it is indexed in the respective search engine.

What is content indexing?

Search engines have robots – called crawlers – that are constantly scouring the ends of the internet in search of new content. These crawlers use links and sitemaps to find content that users might find useful. After finding this content, the indexing process begins. 

Image source: https://neilpatel.com/blog/googles-crawl-budget/

Indexing is understanding content and putting it where it belongs. Speaking specifically of Google (after all, most search engines follow the same pattern), after the crawlers find the content, Google needs to read and understand it before putting it in the right place in the searches. For. that he first has to parse the page or, in other words, translate it into a computer language he can understand. After that, it makes the page – like a normal browser – display the content and its appearance. When this is done, it uses the signals and information from this page to place it in the right place in Google's index.

Once indexed, the content will be ranked, according to specific criteria such as originality of the content (google, like university professors, penalizes plagiarism and copying content from other sites), the loading speed of the website in question, the adaptability of that content for mobile devices and so on.

Once this ranking is ready, the site receives a score, also called pagerank. The higher the score, the better the performance of that site in the search engine. When the user makes a search, Google will search for all the contents indexed in its base and will display them, in descending order, according to the correspondence of the searched term and the content, added to the pagerank of the respective site.

It is worth mentioning that indexing is optional for website developers and there are cases where content will not be indexed on purpose (such as sensitive data, internal networks, among others). This content is online, but it's as if you don't have a map to get to it. Therefore, it is only possible to access such contents, with the respective link and not through searches.

Difference between organic search and paid search 

Most search engines display two types of searches, paid and organic. Paid searches, in the case of Google, are results from advertisers that are displayed according to the terms searched by the user and these advertisers pay each time someone clicks to access their site.

Organic searches are precisely the result of the pagerank of the site in question, as well as the compatibility of the site's content and the term searched by the user. In practice, both strategies are valid and we can understand paid results as a good strategy for short-term results, while organic results will bring medium and long-term results.

How SEO can benefit businesses 

Content marketing is an interesting aspect of marketing that can help your company generate value for your target audience. We recently published a specific post about content marketing.

Regarding the technology that will be used on your site, WordPress is usually one of the most popular options. We also have a post on our blog on this topic. Check it out!

Ready to start your SEO strategy? We hope the post has helped you. Remember that VFR Tech specializes in Digital Marketing and we are here to help.

If you need it, get in touch!